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I’ve been remiss in my linking. I know that, this blog hasn’t always been at the forefront of my mind. But I do still read up everything people are contributing about WAR, and the various forums, and for that reason my WCPI contribution for this ‘period’ can only be Warhammer Alliance.

I’ve had some issues with Warhammer Alliance in the past, I don’t think we need to go into those. But, the site has truly become a fan haven, and has gone from strength to strength in terms of community involvement, and producing original content that truly worth reading. It’s become an information hub more than a series of forums. And its front page is now one of my primary stops on the net, and I read all the articles before I even consider heading to the forums.

The European forums are due to launch shortly and, because of that, GOA is offering players the chance to change their nicknames.

Why is this important? Well, because your official nickname will also be what you’re known as on the European Warhammer forums. So if you picked something silly, or even your real name (which may well be silly), it’s time to head on over to the WAR-Europe site and get it changed, pronto. You have until the forums go live (no jokes about 2010 please!)

I would have tested it out for you all, but I’ve already got Arbitrary as mine, and I’m worried I’ll change it to something like skwys and then not be able to change it back…

Incorporates some of yesterday’s updates, because I’m doing lots of overtime this week and behind with my reading. So fasten your seatbelts, and join me as I read through my feed reader, with no idea what I’ll stumble upon.

Ha ha, Griffon Battlemasters in Nordenwatch change their appearance? I never noticed! Really, I barely look at them I’m baying for blood so much on starting a scenario

Yay, some bloggers have been city sieging – boo, it’s not always gone too well. We’ve not got past problems with fortress capturing, so I’ve not been to a big city capture yet, and I’m not geared up for one anyway, but it’s both good to see it happening more regularly, and bad that it still needs some wrinkles ironed out. We shouldn’t be beta testing this as much in a live game, and I hope once changes are made they work and are well received. For myself, I’ve gone more for levelling and lower tier RvR as my route to enjoyment these days. Reroller has a good summary of bloggers’ experiences with cities up

It’s good to have a sense of humour about losing in scenarios and to check the scoreboard at the end to see why, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had THIS problem

Are Choppas and Slayers too cool for school? I think they might be, but at this point, what the hell!

An MMO can truly be classed as evil, when it makes you think of Britney Spears

Oh Ysharros, you hid an interesting nugget in there didn’t you? Would you pay $5/month to support a game even if you weren’t playing it? To keep things ticking over rather than the full subscription? I’m not sure I’d pay that much, but I might pay a nominal fee… (ps. I’ve not been on to Murder Night yet, but I’ll explain why on Nerf the Cat sometime)

Hrrm, March 19th the day to look into booking hotels for San Diego Comic Con. Will HAVE to remember that. Remind me! We’ll have a WAR player get-together, I’m sure (run by US bloggers, I’m hoping, so I can hide in there somewhere)

Cats – get OFF my desk!!!!!!!!!!!!! (they are fighting around the monitor, seriously)

Forums, official and unofficial are a timesink. Discuss! Actually, go see what the unofficial forums think about official forums – but remember, they’re not going to say anything impolite, are they? I mean, would you when you still want the devs to visit, etc?

Romantic costumes on your Xbox 360 avatars is NOT a good way to celebrate Valentines, guys & gals. But the comments almost made me fall out my chair grinning!

Nic’s popped onto Freddyshouse to answer some questions about official forums in Europe that I think are worth noting:

In our new years message as well as in our January newsletter we did confirm that we will have official forums alongside Mythic’s.

To answer some other questions I can respond to now:

There will be three different forums, one for the US players, one for the European players and one for the Russian players.

The Mythic and GOA forums (not sure about the Russian one at this time (in Soviet Russia Forums host you?)) will be using the same forum software. There will be no Flash.

To be able to post on these forums you need an active account, currently the plan is to allow anyone to read the public sections of the forum.

Both forums are currently being prepared.

More information in the weeks to come.

Of course, European players’ biggest concerns over separating out forums is that we won’t have the same access to developers and Mythic’s team as the US players. Hopefully the Mythic team will prove that fear to be a false one, but I live with it on LotRO forums, I’m guessing Spinks deals with it for WoW forums… so my prediction is that we Europeans will not get the same access as the American players do.

And we will continue to cry ‘injustice’, but really… it won’t change anything. GOA will do their best to answer things and pass on comments, but it comes down to the game devs and marketing team themselves to ensure all their customers receive the same treatment.

In good news, no Flash though, as feared by some (and not just those who ponce about with iPhones!). I, for one, look forward to getting to know my fellow Euro players over the official forums.

James from Mythic stopped by the Vault to go into more detail about the EU and US split in forums. We’ll see what happens!

Ok, so I’m up early and we have a wait till this big announcement. Go read some new blogs, the blogroll on the side here is fairly extensive and I still have more to add. So, I’ll let you read through some with me, as I read my feed reader this morning, these are the things that strike me:

Skurmish has gone and got a WAR a screenshot on Massively, in the One Shots segment. Congrats!

Oh no! Schlotzy’s is closing (but I understand why), I enjoyed it while it lasted!

Reroller is right, the Sigmar tattoo is… odd. That’s not to say I haven’t made a toon with it, and then deleted her!

I know I’ve been out of the loop for a while, but really.. people dropping out of scenarios again. Mythic – this is tragic. And lame, and cowardly, and playing the numbers game – which all MMOs get to eventually with some players.

Addicted to oRvR? You should be (perhaps). I’ll be passing the news of this oRvR tracker add-on to my guild, for sure.

Keen will never shave his head and dye the mohawk orange, Syp. You know that! I’ve had a mohawk, and considered it. But then I didn’t get a Valentine’s so my hair is staying where it is! (If anyone wants to see me with a mohawk, I might post it, sometime!)

Baby giraffes are cute. Maybe this is the one they’re discussing in Prancing Pony (oops, wrong game!)

Regis is playing scrabble for me. Good, cos I’m lazy and it’s early in the morning. I think WAR event hints works nicely, for the record. Go write Regis a nice Valentine’s poem for your arch-nemesis. Um.. I’ll think up one, honest.

That’s it for today, I might keep this format, of my initial thoughts as I go through my reader… tell me what you think

Yesterday was a disaster for GOA. The Patcher was down; the Authentication front end went down; the Authentication back-end database fell over; the Connection between the front and back-end was dodgy; Communication for most of the day was dire to non-existent. And even if they get it working today, they’ve lost the confidence of most of the fans who were hyped enough about the game to want to try the Open Beta in Europe. It’s not good enough and everyone knows it. The fact that the US side had been running relatively smoothly is only going to make people here feel even more like second class citizens (I hate that phrase but expect to hear it even more now).

It is true that the game servers have been running smoothly in the EU, for those (mostly CB testers) who were able to access them. This is A Good Thing. Just it doesn’t tell us much about how they will run under a higher load. Hopefully we’ll know more about that by the end of the week.

Make no mistake, the people who decide to give EU WAR a miss based on that experience will not mostly be buying US versions. It’s a hassle to do that from here. They’ll just go play something else. Some will let other people be the guinea-pigs for the first couple of months and then decide, others won’t look back. I don’t have the heart for a full-scale rant, like Arbitrary I’m just very disappointed.

WHA also comes out of this very badly indeed. Aside from being hammered into near-oblivion, it became such a hotbed of teh crazy yesterday that even MJ commented on the general level of nerd rage and I think we know where he was reading it from. I know I’m not going back to WHA unless I have no choice now, Freddyshouse was a relative beacon of civilisation in comparison. And much as I love the guys there, that isn’t a phrase I ever expected to use in anger. I would advise everyone who found WHA to be a madhouse to check out other forums — there are perfectly viable alternatives.

So:

1/ GOA screwed up. Their current latest update from their CEO (see previous post) says that the authentication database issue still isn’t solved. There was a note from the team earlier that they planned to let the DB chunter through the backlog and then close it down for maintenance with a plan to be running again late Monday morning. We’ll see.

2/ If you don’t like the tone of one forum, pick another. News will get around.

3/ Game servers are running fine if you can get authentication sorted out. We will have to see how they run under a heavier load.

4/ There’s a full week of Open Beta left to run. It’s not over until it’s over. If they can fix this and prove that they fixed it, it’s not an unrecoverable situation.

5/ Try primal scream therapy. It’s free.

6/ If you read down to the bottom, you deserve a tip. War Lions can now be named. It’s /petname <name>